A Harvard Professor Breaks Down the Real Rules of Writing
Jason Hellerman summarizes an interview with Harvard linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker about “what makes great writing and how you can command attention in the modern era.” The target audience for this piece is writers interested in producing fiction and screenwriting for the general public.
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.”
In one of the deepest dives I’ve seen into the question of how AI is affecting college students and their teachers, Hua Hsu, a staff writer for The New Yorker who teaches at Bard College, discusses several key questions with both students and their instructors.
Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully)
Dan Leach, author of the novel Junah at the End of the World, discusses five works that he describes as anti-novels: books that are short on the usual stuff like plot, setting, and character development, and long on “voice, fragment, and flow.”
The 10 Most Extreme Experiments Known to Literature
“These books do their very best to break the rules of storytelling”
Leach (see entry above) discusses some experimental works of fiction. Here writer Tom Comitta presents 10 more works for “readers eager for new forms, stories, politics, and imaginative worlds.”
How The New York Times is (still) getting gamed by the right
Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at The New York Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. The paper’s obsession with a view from nowhere is long-standing, but as Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theori
The question of how news sources frame certain information is becoming alarmingly crucial in American politics—and culture in general.
Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?
Alexander Nazaryan documents the rise of Russian American novelist Gary Shteyngart, author most recently of Vera, or Faith, into a fashion and style icon to rival past “literary giants like Norman Mailer and George Plimpton.”
Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books
See the list of favorite novels that Stephen King submitted to J. Peder Zane for the 2007 book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. It’s quite a diverse list of works “that explore basic defects in the human character.”
Even Better the Second (or Third, or Fourth…) Time: In Praise of Re-Reading
Since September is my personal month for rereading, I was drawn to this discussion by novelist Kathy Wang of books that warrant rereading: “there are certain books where even if you’ve already solved the murder, even if you already know how it’s all going to turn out, you still don’t mind reading it again because the pleasure there isn’t really the ending but rather the journey.”
From Paris to New York and Further Afield: How Bookshops Transport Us
“Cross-cultural bookstores like Paris’ Shakespeare and Company and Albertine Books in New York have served as portals to other places in my reading journey.”
Hudson Warm describes several transportive bookshops she has visited in the U.S. and abroad.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
